Wednesday, August 22, 2007

The Queen and I

We had tried for about six weeks to get the Queen of Lesotho to set a date for the wheelchair presentation and of course were told that she would when she was ready...Remember the "only the Queen counts" statement? Well, we were getting pretty desperate to get it taken care of so I wrote a letter to the Queen's secretary saying, "we humbly appeal to Her Majesty to consider August 18th as a possible date for the wheelchair presentation" and "we are grateful to be able to donate the wheelchairs to her to give to the disabled in your country...." Well, that seemed to do the trick because a couple days later we received an email saying, "With regards to the handing-over of the wheelchairs to Her Majesty, I have it in command from Her that it will greatly please Her if this could be done on August 18, 2007 at 11:00 am. here at the Palace grounds." Hip,hip horrah!!! On Friday the migration to Lesotho began. Two missionary couples left in the morning, the Employment Specialists and the Public Affairs Directors. At 2:30we left the Area Office in our little Kia and were followed by the Director ofTemporal Affairs, Bob Cowan, with his family and Paul Koelliker, Area Seventyand his wife in a big van. They are all rather new to the country so wanted us to lead the way. After a huge delay in a traffic jam, we were on our way and arrived at the B & B in Ladybrand at 7:15. We were learning a great lesson inpatience at the Italian restaurant that night....it took 2 hours to get our food!! We should have saw the writing on the wall....The next morning we headed for the border to cross into Lesotho. A very rareoccurrence was taking place right before our eyes....bus loads of people in lineto get their passports stamped to get out of South Africa. Not only was there a multitude of people but they thought nothing about crowding and cutting in line. It seemed like we were going backwards instead of forward! It was a terriblef eeling to think that after all the pains of planning and bringing so many people down for the presentation that now, we might not even get there for it. We stood in line for two and a half hours and I called the Queen's Secretary a couple of times to let her know what was happening....she finally laughed and said, " Next time you need to stay in Lesotho instead of Ladybrand!" She was totally right. She also said they were going to start at 11:30 to see if we could make it by then. We were at the passport windows at 11:00, got through the Lesotho border quickly and made it to the Palace grounds by 11:30. It turned out to be the most pleasant of ceremonies and it was even shown on their national TV station!You can put that on our blog...the one picture is of the Queen, Pres. Koellikerand your mom. I'll write another email telling you about our visit to Clocolan andFicksburg.Love you,Mom and Dad

It is obviously winter time there b/c you are all dressed so warmly. Seems strange to see that picture here during a steamy warm August. That's a fabulous picture of you and the Queen but the story of your journey there was truly book worthy.